For most of his life, Jackson Khandelwal lived the life of a typical American teenager and college student, a life where the minor inconvenience of a weak cell phone signal can feel like a major frustration.
All of that changed in early 2020, when a friend’s family invited him to join them on a short ecotourism trip to a village in the Ecuadorian Amazon where the solar-powered internet signal is limited to a few square feet of coverage.
Within a week, Khandelwal was captivated by the village, Llanchamacocha; the clear river water that runs past the villagers’ small, thatched huts; and the poetry woven into the songs of the birds in the canopy overhead and into the ancestral wisdom and dialect of the Kichwa language of the Sápara people.
He will bring those memories with him later this month, when he joins the incoming class of the University of Virginia’s School of Law.
When a villager invited Khandelwal to come back during his 2021 summer break from his classes at Ohio State University, Khandelwal didn’t hesitate to book another flight out of Columbus (after a COVID test, of course). He did, however, hold back on his opinions. Though he wanted to be of service to the Sápara, he knew he had as much – if not more – to learn by observing and integrating into his new friends’ way of life, and listening as they explained the existential threats they face.
“My mission was just to learn as much as possible about how to be an ally. I didn’t want the trip to be about me bringing my perspectives and opinions from the outside world to them and telling them what I think they need,” Khandelwal said. “I wanted to learn about their reality, their perspectives and their struggle from their own voices.”
Grit and resilience developed quickly when Khandelwal was faced with the realities of life in the jungle. Within a week, one family asked him to accompany them on a three-mile trip upriver to clear an agricultural plot. The group traveled in a canoe dug from a tree trunk, paddled by hand and relied on nothing but yucca juice for hydration. When they arrived, he spent the next day bushwhacking with a rusty machete – a tool he’d never used in his summer landscaping jobs back home.
“I learned that if I was tired or hungry, or whatever, that was really a ‘me problem,’ and it didn’t change the reality of what we needed to do,” Khandelwal said. “But it meant so much to me that they believed in me – that they believed I had this toughness within me.”
His resilience would be tested time and again but, ironically, the most daunting challenge came stateside, after the monthlong visit in July 2021 had ended. After three weeks of fever and crippling gastrointestinal issues, he was admitted to the Ohio State University Medical Center, where he would spend the next five months fighting a potentially fatal disease attacking his heart, brain and neuromuscular system.
On the brink of permanent blindness, an ophthalmologist identified the main culprit as Toxoplasma gondii, a relatively common parasite that typically causes little trouble in healthy people. Doctors speculated that Khandelwal was vulnerable to toxoplasmosis after picking up an earlier bug in the jungle, most likely giardia, from unsanitary water or food.
In his most hopeless moments, Khandelwal drew upon memories of his friends from the village.
“My mind would always circle back to the lessons I learned from the people in Llanchamacocha,” he said. “About resistance, resilience and standing strong and moving forward no matter how large an obstacle one is facing.”
While he was recovering from his illness in Columbus, Khandelwal launched a podcast and created social media content to amplify the voices of indigenous environmental activists, always with an eye on returning to the jungle.
Although his family discouraged him, Khandelwal went back to the Amazon shortly after he was discharged from the hospital, full of energy and the will to serve. He attended political events as an observer, visited devastated oil extraction sites and helped a multi-ethnic women’s collective devise funding plans.
He finished his political science degree online in August 2022 and graduated summa cum laude via Zoom while standing in the middle of the jungle with his new family, huddled around the solar panel that powers the community’s internet signal.
He didn’t leave the jungle again until early November and returned in January – this time, staying until May.
His father joined him in Llanchamacocha for a week this year. “It has always been a great pleasure to bring loved ones to the jungle and to see them learn the same way I have – by listening to the people, their stories, and witnessing their territories and ways of life,” Khandelwal said.
Between his trips to the Amazon, Khandelwal traveled to Thailand annually to teach English classes at an orphanage and conduct home visits to ensure students’ safety. At UVA, he hopes to focus on international human rights and environmental issues. After graduation, his goal is to work alongside indigenous communities resisting exploitation and the extraction of natural resources.
“My father immigrated to the U.S. from India, and our ancestors came from a small, rural village like Llanchamacocha,” Khandelwal said. “We’ve assimilated and lost touch with that way of life, but these indigenous communities have so much to teach us about how to preserve and live with nature.”
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May 4, 2024
